IN EARLY OCTOBER, Franklin Sirmans has just eight days left to work through his Los Angeles bucket list: He’s planning one more round of golf, some tennis with a gallerist friend plus at least one Mets versus Dodgers baseball game. He’ll also make a few final pilgrimages to his favorite restaurants. “I’m not going to miss the chance to go to my sake house, which has an amazing DJ on Saturday nights,” he says. While he’s here, Sirmans has co-opted the bar of the Beverly Wilshire as his ad hoc office. Dapperly dressed in a blazer and pinstriped shirt, he still looks like the head curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he has worked for almost six years. This fall, he took on an even more prestigious position: director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Sirmans, 46, arrives at PAMM in the wake of Thom Collins, the well-liked director who decamped for the Barnes Foundation earlier this year. Collins steered the museum’s move from its former home, a nondescript corner of downtown Miami, to a splashy perch anchoring the new Museum Park on the waterfront. Sirmans is excited about maximizing that new home. “The sense of possibility is incredible,” Sirmans says. “It’s about creating a space that is open to ideas and dialogue.” PAMM’s location and open design, plus its successful new restaurant, Verde, leave him well positioned to achieve his aim of embedding the museum more thoroughly in the city’s everyday life. “It’s about being genuinely in conversation with people and laying a groundwork for them to write their own script.”

His debut as director, however, will lead into Art Basel Miami Beach, an interlude aimed entirely at art-world aficionados. For the first time, instead of jetting in for a whirlwind two-day visit like most insiders, he’ll be juggling dual roles, scouring the various fairs for emerging talent and hosting VIPs at his own institution. “It’s going to be both exhilarating and uncomfortable,” he says of his first days. “So I’ve just got to breathe.” He’ll rely on his wife, Jessica, and 5-year-old daughter, Stella, for help, especially when it comes to the Latin American contingent at his new home. “My Spanish is…” he says, pausing, “getting better. But my daughter is in Spanish immersion: Right now, she can teach me.”

Sirmans attended Manhattan Country School on the Upper East Side through eighth grade, and for a few weeks each year he would spend time at a farm owned by the school in Roxbury, New York. “It was amazing: singing, shop, art—it all played a role there, which was not typical,” he says. “And yeah, we milked cows once or twice a year.” The MCS student body was equally eclectic. One friend and classmate was Adrian Bartos, grandson of architect Armand Bartos, who’s now better known as DJ Stretch Armstrong; he and Sirmans bonded over a mutual love of hip-hop.

For much of Sirmans’s time at MCS, he lived in Harlem. His father, an obstetrician-gynecologist and art collector, encouraged Sirmans’s interest in visual arts via regular visits to the nearby Studio Museum. At the end of high school, Sirmans Jr. logged a stint as a studio assistant to abstract painter Ed Clark. “But I never wanted to be an artist—I was more interested in writing,” he says. “It was part of that cliché poetry thing, the Nuyorican Poets Café.”

Graduating from Wesleyan in 1991, Sirmans made initial forays into the art world by working as a journalist for Flash Art in Milan and in the publications department at the Dia Foundation—but his breakthrough came after he became an independent curator. Ten years ago, Sirmans helped stage a show, Basquiat, at the Brooklyn Museum that focused on the late graffiti artist, whose work he had long admired. “People my age were interested in him, because we were thinking, Why do I feel compelled, with no artistic skill whatsoever, to take a big marker and write my name on a bus?” The show traveled across the country, including to LACMA, and helped earn him the position of curator of modern and contemporary art at Houston’s Menil Collection, where he worked from 2006 until 2009. From there, Sirmans moved to LACMA, in 2010, to reunite with director Michael Govan, an old friend and colleague from his days at Dia.

In Season

Faena Hotel Miami Beach
Photo:
Courtesy of Faena

Franklin Sirmans, the new director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, isn’t the only fresh face in the Magic City. The season kicks off with a flurry of openings to charm locals, snowbirds and Baselites alike. —Rebecca Wallwork

SHOP | As Bal Harbour Shops celebrates 50 years this fall, the shopping district also welcomes Florida’s first Maison Goyard boutique. The interior, inspired by the Parisian trunk maker’s offices at Place Vendôme, is anchored by a lacquered wall in Goyard green. 9700 Collins Avenue; goyard.com

With his love of poetry, film and music, Sirmans quickly embraced the looser confines of the art scene in L.A., where creative boundaries were enthusiastically blurred. “There’s an accessibility to artists here that’s intergenerational. It’s because the environment has been built on a foundation of schools like CalArts, Art Center or USC,” he says. “Ed Ruscha or John Baldessari might be just walking around an opening.”

In 2013, Sirmans partnered with Will Ferrell’s wife, Viveca, a LACMA trustee, to create a new acquisitions fund, Contemporary Friends, while securing major artworks, including one of just six editions of video artist Christian Marclay’s blockbuster hit The Clock, which splices archival footage of countless movies into a hypnotic 24-hour loop, for the museum’s permanent collection. “It’s an amazing visual mash-up on a great scale and comes out of cutting, mixing and pasting, which is a foundational place for me with hip-hop music and DJ culture,” he explains. He wasn’t stymied by stuffy art-world conventions in L.A. and therefore was able to stage unexpected shows, such as his soccer-centric Fútbol: The Beautiful Game. (Sirmans toyed with playing as a pro himself and had helped organize an art-world team when he lived in New York.)

He juggled his day job at LACMA with a gig moonlighting as artistic director of the latest New Orleans biennial in 2014. The experience was a throwback to his days as an independent curator, when infrastructure was often scant and funding tight. “One artist, a very good friend of mine, had their location changed three times. In an institution, you could never do that,” he says. Experience with planning the citywide show will prove handy for his plans at PAMM, which sits in a 30-acre public park. “What can art do, not only on the walls of a gallery, but what might it provoke outside?” he asks. “What does the museum mean to the surrounding community?”

Whatever programs Sirmans develops at PAMM, one artist he’s likely to tap is Mary Ellen Carroll, a veteran collaborator who also participated in the New Orleans show. “Franklin’s got a wicked sense of humor and an empathy with artists,” Carroll says. “He cultivates relationships that are ongoing, not about a means to an end.” Shamim Momin, an alum of the Whitney museum who has been Sirmans’s colleague in Los Angeles for several years and runs the art nonprofit LAND, echoes that affection: “We’re losing a great part of the cultural realm in Franklin. I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to seeing him every December instead of around town.” Seasoned museum heads also expect Sirmans to adapt readily to his new role. “The Miami arts community is very, very lucky to have such a thoughtful, respected colleague take the helm,” says Olga Viso, the longtime director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, via email.

Sirmans’s new role is, indeed, a major promotion, shifting from curating full-time to overseeing an institution. What advice have directors like Viso given to help him prep? Sirmans cracks a grin: “You know what they say? Be ready to raise money. And I’m looking forward to trying to do that.” He’s already planning to turn to some old friends for help. “I’d love to have Stretch Armstrong deejay one of the openings,” Sirmans says.

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